According to Bits.media’s own service, the average transaction fee on the Bitcoin network is about $24.57, with the number of unconfirmed transactions reaching 80,431.
Increased demand for transactions on the network led to a total fee per block temporarily exceeding the established reward for miners of 6.25 BTC on May 7.
This award is cut in half every four years, after the Bitcoin halving.
The amount of commissions jumped over this “threshold” for the first time since 2017 – block number 788695 generated a commission of 6.7 BTC.
The surge of activity in the network of the first cryptocurrency can be explained by an increase in the number of “ordinal numbers”.
According to Glassnode, the Taproot update was used for 75% of transactions on the Bitcoin network on May 7.
Some Twitter users fear that network congestion was the result of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack.
However, many cryptocurrency analysts refuted these rumors, noting that the reason for the network overload is high demand, not a deliberate attack;
According to one user, Bitcoin’s meme finally got some use, and the maximizers of the first cryptocurrency are framing it as a DoS attack on the network.
They overlooked even the simplest scenario, that Bitcoin is becoming popular and people are willing to pay high fees to use it, the user claims.
Due to the situation, the largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance was forced to suspend bitcoin withdrawals twice in 12 hours because of the high volume of transactions awaiting confirmation.